Monday, June 29, 2009

I recently wrote about former U.S. Representative and 2008 Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney having been interviewed on a radio program largely devoted to hate speech against Jews. (Read here.) That interview, conducted by someone calling himself "Ognir", included an allegation that Rahm Emanuel, who was described as being of "Jew nationality and Jew loyalties", actually controlled President Obama on behalf of an international "Zionist" conspiracy. During the interview, "Zionists" were also blamed for promoting illegal drugs, medical marijuana and homosexual marriage in order to weaken American society and make it more malleable to their evil designs. McKinney cheerfully allowed her host to make these claims without disagreeing, responding only with her allegations that "Zionist" spies had infiltrated her campaign for congress (comparing herself to Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King in the process) and agreeing with the host, at great length, that "Zionists" control the president and congress. McKinney enjoyed this hourlong interview so much, she returned for a second one.

To get further insight into the character of that program, read the post I wrote about it. It includes extensive quotes. That program is done by a group associated with a website called InfoUnderground. You can see for yourself who they are by reading their forum here. The member with the "Deathflag" website -- the one sometimes featuring a death's head banner, sometimes a mushroom cloud -- posted some hate-filled comments on this blog, all the while protesting that he's an "anti-racist". After a forum member named "Shiksa Rage" posted that she "bet dollars to doughnuts that this guy is one of the Self Chosen masquerading under a WASPish name", InfoUnderground conducted an investigation into whether my name been changed to hide a Jewish identity. That's here. One of them went so far as to search a website called avotaynu.com and found 20 Jewish names related to "Holland". Who knew? Based on that, I was found out as a "Zionist agent". Read here. I thought it was the Star of David hood ornament on my Aston Martin that gave me away.

Now McKinney has done several more interviews on another racist radio show with far-right links -- this time with a better-known, and much more widely read, internet hate monger called Daryl Bradford Smith. You can read an archived version of his website's homepage here: Zionism Research - The French Connection - Fighting Criminal Zionism. (Has McKinney read it? How did she find these people?) This webpage, on which recordings of the programs featuring McKinney can be found, features a banner headline endorsing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It reads:

The Protocols are sometimes criticized as containing nothing that had not been said previously by philosophers or statesmen; but even if that were true, it would detract little from their interest. For their importance does not lie in the aim, world domination, nor in the theory by which it is attained, exploitation of man's baser instincts, but in the extraordinary astuteness with which the practical application of the plan has been suited to existing conditions.

Smith's homepage links to other pages on his website devoted to the works of infamous bigots such as Charles Coughlin, Denis Fahey, Nesta Webster, and Douglas Reed. The page devoted to Fahey deals with what Smith calls the "Judeo-Bolshevist plot against Christianity". (Read here.) In fact, the vast majority of the authors published by Smith on his website come from the extreme far-right of the political spectrum, and promote, as did the Nazis, the view that communism was a Jewish conspiracy. However, Smith's website also promotes the Stalinist Doctors' Plot myth. It seems that Smith is happy to cross ideological lines and promote myths of czarist, fascist or Stalinist origin, so long as they support his anti-Jewish agenda. Now he's interviewed Cynthia McKinney and added her socialism of fools to the mix.

The mp3 of a June 16 interview posted on Smith's website starts with McKinney waiting on the line as Smith gives a disjointed, grammar-defying introduction to a hate-fest.

"How (is it that) organizations affiliated with a single group of people -- this is important stuff -- we have to define terms. The people we'll be discussing tonight, have, in my view and in the view of research, been involved in activities that are against the republic of the United States and, in many instances, of the world at large. Now they -- many of them -- come from the Jewish community -- not all of them. And many of them are declared Jews -- not all of them. The conspiracy itself -- at the top -- is predominantly a Zionist political ideology. It is important to make these distinction because all Jews are not involved in this . . . The people that are doing this are powerful enough to silence the world's press . . ."

Having thus clarified that he and McKinney will discuss an powerful, international Jewish conspiracy in which not all Jews are culpable, Smith gives the bill of particulars of the crimes of this imaginary conspiracy (i.e. the "crimes against the republic ... and the world"): the Lavon Affair, the U.S.S. Liberty attack, 9/11, and the campaign against McKinney's reelection to congress.

With that, Smith asks McKinney's impressions of the wonderful hospitality she encountered in Gaza. McKinney replies that "has to make a correction". By this she doesn't refer to her host's conspiracy theories connecting Jews to 9/11 or any of the rest of it. She just let's him know that she never actually made it to Gaza.

Smith goes on to compare Israel's accidental attack on the U.S.S. Liberty in 1967 to the interception of a boat on which McKinney attempted to travel from Cyprus to Gaza as part of a propaganda campaign against Israel's blockade. McKinney alleges that the Israelis and the international news media lied about what happened. She goes on to agree with Smith's comparison of her attempted Gaza voyage to the Liberty incident, claiming that the Liberty attack was deliberate and that Israel lied about it.

"The Israelis will lie to cover up an action they carry out which they deem to be in their national interest. It's nothing new . . . The case of the U.S.S. Liberty -- the Israelis were murdering people in Egypt. So they were afraid there were going to be some witnesses to the murder . . . The leaders of Israel have, for the most part, been war criminals."

Smith replies by blaming this on an attitude of Israeli superiority based on a belief that they are "God's chosen people", a biblical phrase which clearly refers not to Israelis, but to Jews in general. (Note: this English translation of a biblical phrase clearly does not refer to a political doctrine of superiority, but to a religious belief connecting Jews to God. I have literally never heard this phrase used in support of Zionism, only against it.)

At this point in his exchange with McKinney, Smith unloads a string of conspiracy theories which may set the record for the most attempts to blame Jews for 9/11 in the least amount of time. McKinney's response is instructive.

Smith: "Mr. (Ron) Lauder -- he donated lots of money for the founding of the Mossad University in Herzliya -- a very important spy center. He was also very important in getting the head of the Port Authority, Lewis Eisenberg, to make the sale to Mr. Lowy and Mr. Silverstein. What about the collusion between these groups? But it doesn't stop there. It goes on to a companies that are watching our airports in Boston and Newark, named ICTS Company International (and) owned by former Mossad active spies -- by the children of the founder of Mossad -- a woman . . . It goes on to Daniel Lewin, Jules Carl (?), and Jerome Hauer, Indigo Systems, and Goldman Sachs making money on it. In other words, we can go down the list of one thing after another. Mohamed Atta -- his apartment in Florida -- both sides had Israelis living in it. The moving company with bombs inside its vans. How about the three Israelis who go back to Israel -- the dancing Israelis -- that they were there to document the event. How did they know that there would be an event to document? And go on and on and on -- and we find people like Dov Zakeheim, a Chabad Lubavitch rabbi, and Ari Fleischer, and Faith Wurmser (Douglas Feith and David Wurmser?). All of these people are actually a fifth column that has invaded our control structure of our government. And they are involved in strong-arming Congress, and they are in complete control of the Executive Branch. Now, how do we get this kind of crime gang from unclenching from their control?"

McKinney: "Well... people have to stand up! One of the things you said -- I do have to say -- I heard an extraordinary (speech) given by Lord Levy, who is, I believe, in the U.K. House of Lords. And the language that he used was absolutely incredible! Basically he said that only 3% of the Israeli people voted for peace and . . . he called Israel an indefensible state . . . Being in the United States, we don't hear that kind of talk at all. It was a Jewish member of the House of Lords who was saying this."

This follows McKinney's pattern of allowing her interviewers make extremist, bigoted comments for her. She then offers her tacit agreement, saying nothing to correct the record. Instead, she launches into an attack on Israel and finds a Jewish ally for her attack. As the comments to this blog have proven, this is good enough for her supporters to defend her from charges of anti-Semitism, and to argue that she does not claim that Israel was behind 9/11. As should be clear by the above exchange, she gives precisely those views her support with her response to Smith's outrageous charges. If she disagreed with him, she would have said so. Anyone with knowledge of the facts and an ounce of decency would have responded by telling Smith exactly what he is.

A litte background

In case you haven't been following McKinney's career of late, she's become a professional anti-Zionist, travelling the world to attend several conferences sponsored by the foundation led by Malaysia's former Prime Minister Mahathir. Mahathir has been spreading some money around to burnish his claims to be a leader of an international anti-Zionist movement: sponsoring several conferences and funding anti-Israel groups. He has also made a point of very publicly linking himself to Ahmadinejad and the Iranian dictatorship. Considering that Mahathir, his chief advisor Matthias Chang and Cynthia McKinney (like Ahmadinejad) all promote anti-Zionism as a form of anti-globalization, maybe I should refer to their ideology as the anti-globalization of fools.

Speaking of Ahmadinejad and Iran, on the night that much of the world were glued to news channels watching the power of the Iranian people risking their lives to voice their outrage at having their votes stolen, viewers of Iran's English-language propaganda channel, Press TV, were treated to several hours of Cynthia McKinney hosting a talk show on racism and the failure of democracy in Obama's America. (Read here . Video of program here.) The timing of that pathetic spectacle does not seem at all coincidental.

McKinney broadcasting on Press TV the night of Iran's elections

Also in June, McKinney announced her founding a political party seemingly modeled after one founded in the U.K. by George Galloway. (Read here or here.) Galloway's was called "Respect"; McKinney's is called "Dignity". Galloway and McKinney have much in common. Galloway, like McKinney, went from serving as a legislator with a major party, to a career devoted to endless self-promotion on the political fringes. Like Galloway before her, McKinney seeks to bring together an anti-Israel coalition of the far-left and Muslim communities. Like Galloway, she appears ready to do business with those who oppose democratic values in their own countries while decrying Israel and the U.S. as undemocratic.

Armed with mailing lists most fringe politicians would envy, McKinney is hoping to draw supporters for her party from the anti-Zionist far-left and far-right and to build a sort of coalition of extremes. Remember that she raised a lot of money for her failed congressional bid in 2006, largely based on anti-Israel fundraising. That built up her mailing list considerably. She presumably has the mailing lists from the several "9/11 truth" groups she' s led. Having been the 2008 Green Party presidential candidate, she must have their mailing list as well. For that reason alone, however absurd her statements and her affiliations are, she is still worth watching. She seems intent on maintaining her position as the United States' most vocal opponent of Israel. As odd and apparently self-destructive as her decision to work with the far-right appears, it may be part of a deliberate strategy to attract attention. She may be banking on the idea that there's no such thing as bad anti-Israel publicity.

As for Daryl Bradford Smith, he has had extensive connections with the Holocaust-denial publication American Free Press, although he appears to have burned his bridges with them by claiming that they too are somehow part of the international "Zionist" conspiracy. (Read here.) In response, some of his former friends have claimed that he is a "Zionist agent", a crypto-Jew or even a"Talmudist". (Read here and here and here and here and here and here.) Like many in the U.S. neo-fascist far-right, Smith spends as much time fighting fellow fascists as he does Jews and other supposed enemies.

My previous posts about McKinney's affiliations with the far-right are available here. Harry's Place covered this story here, the anti-conspiracy theory website Screw Loose Change here, JTA covered it here, Little Green Footballs here and History News Network reposted my one of my posts on McKinney here.

And while I'm on the subject of McKinney's supporters on the extreme right, there's this odd fellow.

The following links go straight to mp3's of McKinney's interviews posted on Smith's website. The first of these interviews, done on June 16, is available here. The second, done June 17, is here. The third, done on June 24, is here. A fourth, done on June 25, is here. I intend to continue digesting these interviews in the upcoming days in order to to continue to put McKinney's ties to the far-right on the record. Stay tuned.

As always, if anyone wishes to correct any factual errors in this or any other post, feel free to post a comment. Also feel free to offer your opinions. I am debating whether to allow the sort of hostile invective previous posts about McKinney have elicited from her supporters, including gross obscenities, bigotry, misogyny, and threats of and allusions to acts of violence. While it's useful to see exactly who is supporting McKinney, I hate to expose readers to that sort of material. McKinney supporters: when commenting, remember that readers are judging your views by how you choose to express yourself.

Yehuda Alkalai is one of Jewish history's remarkable figures. Fifty years before Theodor Herzl convened the First Zionist Congress in 1897, Alkalai was agitating for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Alkalai, a rabbi who served the community in the capital of Serbia, was influenced by the events occurring around him. The Damascus Blood Libel in 1840 - the Muslim authorities framed, arrested and tortured the leaders of the Syrian Jewish community for ritually murdering a priest - convinced him that Jews needed a haven from anti-Semitism.

Yehudah Alkalai.

But there was another factor in Alkalai's Zionist quest that cannot be ignored: The Serbs were staging a national rebellion against their overlords, the Ottoman Empire. This fight against Islamic imperialism inspired him to ask why Jews were not engaged in a battle for their own national independence.

Delegates at the UN and professors on university campuses worldwide brand the State of Israel the creation of a racist and colonialist European imperialism. This libel of the Jewish state betrays an ignorance of the history of the Jews and the story of the Zionist movement. From the beginning, the Zionist movement has been a foe of imperialism. Rebellions of national independence against the Ottoman and Russian empires influenced precursors of the Zionist movement, such as Alkalai and Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Kalischer. Moses Hess, a socialist, looked toward Garibaldi's Italy as his inspiration for a Jewish homeland in Israel.

Herzl's concept of a Jewish state was based on the 19th-century liberal European nation-state. Even Vladimir Jabotinksy, an admirer of Mussolini's fascist regime, always stressed the influence of democracy on his political ideology. No major Zionist leader or thinker ever claimed that Zionism's goals were the imperialist domination of any other people. The accusation made by enemies of Israel that the Jewish state is an imperialist outpost of the West in the Middle East is a lie.

If the Zionist founders of the State of Israel were, indeed, imperialists, what empire did they represent? The pioneers who founded the modern State of Israel were young men and women who were fleeing pogroms and poverty in the Russian Pale of Settlement. It is true that Zionist founders such as Herzl looked toward imperial powers such as Britain and the Ottomans to back the building of a Jewish state. It is true that the Balfour Declaration of 1917 committed British imperialists to the creation of a Jewish home in Palestine. In the end, however, the British Empire betrayed the Jews of Europe to curry favor with the Arab world. It shut the gates of Jewish immigration to Palestine, abandoning the Jews to their fate in Nazi-occupied Europe.

THOSE WHO claim the Zionists have always been imperialists are actually racists. They deny the fact that although Jews lived in Europe and resembled the white-skinned Europeans with whom they lived, the Christians of Europe never believed Jews could ever be true Germans or Frenchmen. For more than a millennium, Christians and Muslims persecuted Jews, branding them inferiors and social outcasts, not caring what the color of Jewish skin was. We forget that racism is not only an issue of color. The Nazi regime destroyed 6 million Jews based on vile and false theories of Aryan racial superiority.

Sunday, June 28, 2009

Last week, the Times ran an article on the John Birch Society which was brief but good. It's especially vital reading for people who hear about the conspiracy theories driving a lot of far-right politics without knowing their historical context. The John Birch Society invented a number of these theories, and they're still going strong in promoting them. By the way, their national convention this year featured a keynote address by a John Birch supporter named Ron Paul, whose presidential campaign got some of these crackpot theories more attention than they've had in years.

Readers of this blog will find the following quote concerning John McManus, president of the John Birch Society, interesting.

In late 2005 . . . (Arthur) Thompson became chief executive (of the John Birch Society) after staging a coup with the help of John McManus, the society’s most prominent member, its longtime president and an ultraconservative Roman Catholic. This prompted some ousted Birchers to disseminate recorded snippets of Mr. McManus lecturing to Catholic groups that Judaism became a dead and deadly religion after the establishment of the Catholic Church.

Mr. McManus is also heard to say that militant Jews have influenced the Freemasons, who are “Satan’s agents,” “the enemies of Christ Church” — and, in the view of the John Birch Society, part of the Illuminati conspiracy to cause world upheaval.

Mr. Thompson said that he was initially outraged by these comments, but that he now understands they were made in the context of Mr. McManus’s belief in Catholicism as the one true faith. He said the John Birch Society has Jewish and black members and has never tolerated anti-Semitism or racism, notwithstanding its notorious opposition to much of the civil rights movement.

So McManus' Birch Society conspiracy mongering has roots in radical traditionalist Catholic thinking, which promotes the idea that a conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons works covertly to destroy the Catholic church. Read here for an example of this line of thinking -- an example which praises McManus by name.

Better yet, try this website which features the anti-Jewish writings of the notorious bigot Father Leonard Feeney, founder in 1949 of the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. This group runs facilities known as the St. Benedict Center of Still River, Massachusetts and Richmond, New Hampshire. Before founding his radical order, Feeney made a habit of espousing extreme hatred of Jews from atop a soap box in Boston Common, as well as from church pulpits and in college classrooms. The church condemned these activities. When Feeney responded with even more provocative activism, he was excommunicated. (Read here. More on this below.)

Three weeks ago, John McManus gave the commencement speech at the Feeneyites' Immaculate Heart of Mary School. According to that school's website (read here), McManus has been

" a friend of the Center and Third Order member of the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary since the 1970's."

McManus, as a Third Order member of the Feeneyites, follows the order's teachings to the letter. Although they do not take all of a monk's vows, such as celibacy or renunciation of possessions, Third Order members literally live under the instruction of the leadership of the order, as if they were monks, and are obliged to serve the order to a much greater degree than ordinary laymen. (In the words of another schismatic tradionalist order, the SSPX, the"Third Order is a state of life midway between the cloister and the world". Read here.)

To get a sense of the nature of this group, read the following excerpt from the Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Report concerning this group's facility in Richmond, New Hampshire (read here):

Paul Anthony Melanson, a Catholic writer who lives in nearby Manchester, has been warning of the SBC's extremist rhetoric on his blog for years. In an interview with the Intelligence Report, Melanson said he first became aware of the SBC in 1990. What bothered him most, he said, was the SBC's wholehearted embrace of the thinking of the late Father Leonard Feeney, the founder of the Slaves. Melanson described Feeney as "a tremendously gifted writer and talented man, but also an individual who was on the verge of a nervous breakdown and began to say and do strange things."

Feeney founded the Slaves in Cambridge, Mass., in 1949, long before the Vatican sought to begin a reconciliation with Jews in the 1960s, during the liberalizing Vatican II reforms. He became known for the Jew-bashing sermons he delivered regularly on the Boston Common, like this 1953 rant: "Every Protestant hates the Jews. Harvard loathes Jews. That is why they got a new president — to keep the Jews away! I don't hate Jews for the reason he hates them. I hate them because they hate Jesus. They hate Jesus because they are Jews!"

Feeney was excommunicated that same year, and although he reconciled with the church shortly before his 1979 death, the Diocese of Manchester states that it "has no relationship" with the current Saint Benedict Center (neither does the official Roman Catholic Church). "Therefore," a diocesan official said recently, "faithful Roman Catholics are urged to not participate."

Yet the Slaves hotly defend Feeney and his beliefs from any criticism, echoing the anti-Semitism of their founder as they do.

In 2004, SBC prior Louis Villarrubia, who goes by the name of Brother Andre Marie, put it like this: "If anti-Semitism means opposing the Jews on religious matters, opposing the Zionist state in Palestine (as St. Pius X did), or opposing the Jewish tendency to undermine public morals (widely acknowledged by Catholic writers before the present age of PC [political correctness]), then we could rightly be considered such."

That same year, The Boston Globe quoted Brother Anthony Mary, whose real name is Douglas Bersaw, blaming the Jews for the murder of Christ and denying the World War II Holocaust: "There's a lot of controversy among people who study the so-called Holocaust. There's a misperception that Hitler had a position to kill all the Jews. It's all a fraud. Six million people… it didn't occur."

In 2005, at a radical conference hosted by a group called St. Joseph's Forum, Bersaw added that "the perpetual enemy of Christ is the Jewish nation" and said Jews should be dealt with using "blood and terror if it's required."

McManus not only knows about the Feeneyites bigotry against Jews, he supports these views wholeheartedly and has a history of espousing them. And Father Feeney's views dovetail perfectly with those of the Birchers. Take Feeney's loony 1958 essay on how the Jews used the New York Times to promote communism in Spain and promote what he called the "rape" of "Catholic Palestine" (read here). Here are are two excerpts:

"Essential to the understanding of our chaotic times is the knowledge that the Jewish race constitutes a united anti-Christian bloc within Christian society, and is working for the overthrow of that society by every means at its disposal. And because the daily press, as we know it, is the child of the Masonic era — the era which thinks it meet and just that the Jews should be allowed to subvert Christianity if they can — newspapers have had no sure ground for combating the Jewish take-over. Difficult Gentile journalists have been brought into line simply by being reminded of the Liberal, Masonically-inspired principles which all newspaperdom takes for granted. For example, the Jews have had no difficulty in getting yards of publicity and loud editorial acclaim for their Interfaith and Brotherhood endeavors. The premise underlying these movements — that to adore Christ as God and to reject Him as an impostor are both commendable, brotherly forms of religious activity — is never questioned. And this lack of protest has plainly unnerved Christian resistance to the encroachments of the Jews.

As for the large, distracting doses of smut and scandal which most papers regularly serve up, Jewish interests have done their best to encourage this poisonous diet in a number of ways — perhaps most effectively by waging incessant war against censorship and anti-obscenity regulations, wherever they may be found.

One further, and most necessary, aspect of the Jews’ press campaign has been to make sure that, as their anti-Christian purposes and activities proceed, nothing gets into the papers that would expose them to public view. To this end, they have found that what they cannot achieve by persuasion they can usually get by intimidation.

Because few newspapermen have the fortitude to stand up against high-pressure tactics, even those editors not intellectually convinced of the supremacy of the Jewish race are inclined to print articles favorable to the Jews, or else to keep quiet about them. So effective have Jewry’s organized intimidations proven that many overly-timid or flaccid-willed editors have decided to play safe by turning over to the Jews as many of their news columns as they might require, to be filled with whatever material the Jews might suggest.

and...

(The New York Times') publisher is probably the least rabbinical-looking Hebrew ever to receive a degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary. His name is Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and his particular Jewish news enterprise is called The New York Times.

Unlike some Jewish papers, The New York Times appears daily and in English. Unlike many Jewish papers, the Times employs quantities of non-Jews in all its departments. And like no other Jewish paper (or magazine, or broadcast or news service), Mr. Sulzberger’s is an eminently assimilated one. It travels agreeably in the most rarefied Gentile company. Partisan newsmen look to it as America’s great neutral daily, the nation’s one “newspaper of record.” Scholars the world over cite it as an accepted, standard reference.

Through all these unlikely achievements, the Times has moved with gravity and balance. Cloaked in a conservatism which might have been tailored by the Brooks Brothers themselves, Mr. Sulzberger’s paper gives witness, in print if not in person, to the venerable virtues of that classic individual: the White, the very White, Jew.

But, as happens to the Whitest of them, every once in a while Mr. Sulzberger’s paper forgets itself. The Jewishness comes through. Often, we must say, it is no more than an airy suggestion — like a gentle breeze out of distant delicatessens.

At other times, however, it is close to overwhelming."

Now that the Times has accurately represented the Birchers as nutty for a multitude of far out conspiracy theories, and has also accurately represented McManus as a religious bigot, I wonder if McManus believes the report to be part of the same imaginary Jewish conspiracy decried by his spiritual master Leonard Feeney. If not, he might simply believe as Birch Society founder Robert Welch did, that the Times' criticism of the Birchers was evidence that the Times is an instrument of a non-sectarian international communist conspiracy.

UPDATE: The Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary website runs a disclaimer that they do not endorse anti-Semitism (read here[NOTE: this document has been deleted from the Slaves website, but a document containing some of the same text is still available via a third-party archive here.]); however, the disclaimer itself is filled with it. In fact, it goes so far as to recommend a notorious book by Father Denis Fahey which alleged that a conspiracy of Jews and communists sought to destroy the church. This book was an inspiration for the anti-Semitic broadcasts of Father Coughlin. Here's a quote:

Anti-Semitism is hatred of Jews. We love Jews because we want them to convert so that they can live the life of grace and go to heaven. Like many saints (e.g., Sts. Augustine, John Chrysostom, Thomas Aquinas, Maximilian Maria Kolbe and many others), popes (e.g., Pope Benedict XIV) and other great Catholic thinkers (e.g., Hilaire Belloc, Father Dennis Fahey), we realize that the 'organized naturalism' of the Jewish Nation is at enmity with Our Lord’s plan, and this manifests itself in numerous ways. This is not racism, bigotry, or prejudice. It is a fact of history which is very documented. Father Dennis Fahey's balanced and intelligent work, The Kingship of Christ and the Conversion of the Jewish Nation, which bears the imprimatur, is must reading on this subject."

It seems that these people are followers of Fahey's brand of mystical bigotry. (Read here and here.) Fahey is the fountainhead from which much of radical traditionalism's extreme anti-Jewish philosophy springs. I can't do it justice in this space, but here's a one sentence explanation. Fahey believed that the Catholic church was the "Mystical Body of Christ" and that modern Jews seek to kill that body just as, he said, Jews killed the physical body of Christ. In a nutshell, that's the blend of hate and religion espoused by Fahey, Feeney and their followers.

UPDATE 2: Here's a brief 1953 article on Feeney from Time magazine. Its title quotes Feeney himself: "I preach hate".

On Friday, June 19, our Museum community joined the family and friends of Officer Stephen Johns at a deeply moving service that mourned his loss, celebrated his life and paid tribute to his legacy. Officer Johns’ pastor challenged all of us to do more to honor the ideals that our beloved colleague sacrificed his life protecting. We are moving forward with renewed dedication to our work, but our first priority is Officer Johns’ family.

Therefore, the Museum has established the USHMM Officer Johns Family Fund. One hundred percent of your gift will be forwarded directly to the family of Officer Johns. Please note that under IRS regulations gifts such as this are not tax-deductible.

We are most appreciative for the outpouring of support and messages of condolence we have received from so many concerned citizens and organizations across the country and around the world. Officer Johns will be deeply missed by his Museum family and all who knew him.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

James von Brunn, who is accused of murdering security guard Stephen Johns in the course of a terrorist attack on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on June 10, had longstanding ties to far-right, racist groups. These connections are evident in his letters to retired Marine Corps General Pedro A. Del Valle, himself an activist of the racist far-right, who provided both material support and philosophical inspiration to von Brunn.

According to the memoir von Brunn published on his website (available here, in cached version), his connection to General Del Valle goes back at least to the mid-1960s. In fact, von Brunn credits Del Valle with inspiring his anti-Semitism by giving him a book.

"In 1964 Gen. Pedro del Valle gave me John O. Beaty's The Iron Curtain Over America. For the first time I learned how JEWS had destroyed Europe and were now destroying America."

This book, which Del Valle ardently promoted among his like-minded colleagues in the military, helped popularize among the radical right the myth that modern Jews are descended from a medieval Central Asian nation called the Khazars. It presents a paranoid version of modern history in which the Russian Revolution, the creation of the Federal Reserve system, and the founding of the State of Israel and the United Nations all derive from what it describes as a "Khazar Jewish" conspiracy. The book presents this conspiracy in Cold War terms as a communist plot threatening the survival of the United States.

In his online memoir, von Brunn also refers to the assistance he was given by General Del Valle, stating that Del Valle testified on his behalf at his trial for assaulting a police officer during a DWI arrest, and that Del Valle found him employment with a publisher of racist literature called Noontide Press.

I've had the opportunity to review three letters which von Brunn wrote to General Del Valle in the mid-1970s. These letters confirm the long-standing connections of both men to extremist, far-right racist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, American Party and Liberty Lobby, and to neo-Nazis such as Willis Carto and David Duke. I have not yet had the opportunity to review General Del Valle's responses to these letters.

Letter #1

The first of the three letters I've reviewed is dated March 31, 1975. Von Brunn appears to be responding to Del Valle's praise of the American Party and the Liberty Lobby, organizations which von Brunn believed too moderate to be effective.

"Personally I see no significant accomplishments resultant of their efforts --Zionism-Communism control over America has never been so complete. Our country never in such peril. (sic)"

In a hand-written post script, von Brunn elaborates that he believes a more violent approach is needed.

"The AP [American Party] and LL [Liberty Lobby] are ok in most respects, their strategy is wrong (sic). A strike force at the "grass roots level" is called for."

Von Brunn indicates in the letter that he was enclosing a copy of an article he had submitted to Willis Carto's American Mercury magazine, although that article was not included in the file I reviewed.

Letter #2

The second letter is dated August 9, 1975. In it, Von Brunn indicates that several days earlier he had met with David Duke and what he describes as "leaders of the KKK". Von Brunn's letter states that the Klan was in the process of changing from a "vigilante - direct action methodology" to a political one. Von Brunn disapproved.

"Too bad I say. I asked them the rhetorical question, 'what good is a political approach when the machinery of government is controlled by the enemy' . . . All of Western Civilization hangs by a thread. At the mercy of the Zionists. (sic) "

Von Brunn makes clear that he believes in violent opposition to the government, and implies that Del Valle was in accord with this belief.

"You and I have agreed, always, that the time for playing political games has long past. But who will finance the man with a gun? I have found no one . . . I've talked to leaders of the Catholic Church (Monseigneurs) (sic) ... oil company presidents, leaders in industry ... they're all afraid! "

Von Brunn goes on to inform General Del Valle that he had left his job at Noontide Press. In his online memoir, von Brunn alleges that he was fired after discovering that the publisher's defacto CEO, Willis Carto, was publishing a new edition of Iron Curtain Over America without paying royalties to the estate of its author.

Interestingly, von Brunn concludes the letter by asserting to Del Valle that he is not a government agent:

"If you still believe that I was an agent of the FBI or any government agency at any time (other than the USNR [i.e. U.S. Naval Reserve]) give me a lie detector test. I'll gladly answer any question you put to me . . ."

A handwritten note on the bottom of the letter, presumably written by von Brunn himself as a post script, reads

The third letter is dated November 18, 1975. Von Brunn refers to meeting with David Duke, seemingly the same meeting referred to in his August letter. Again, von Brunn advocates that the Klan take a more violent approach. He also alludes to his belief that Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, General George Patton and Senator Joseph McCarthy were all victims of a Jewish conspiracy.

"David Duke, KKK, is a fine young man. Apparently, he is doing well with the movement. But, as you know, my advice to him was to form a strike-force. The Enemy will allow him so much rope - no more. When he becomes bothersome he will meet the same fate as Forrestal, Patton, McCarthy and the rest of the Patriots."

Von Brunn mentions his money and career troubles, and indicates that he is attempting to produce a film with an anti-Zionist theme. He writes that he has pitched the film to several unnamed "well-heeled individuals", and asks if Del Valle knows any "wealthy Arabs". He also states that he is waiting for a reply from "General Glubb". This reference to Sir John Bagot Glubb, Britain's last proconsul for the Middle East (read here and here and here) is explained in a movie pitch which von Brunn enclosed with the letter.

According to the pitch, the film was to be a fictional adaptation of Conquest through Immigration, an anti-Zionist book of non-fiction by George W. Robnett. Robnett was the founder in 1937 of the Church League of America, an anti-Semitic and anti-communist group known for publishing the names of individuals it identified as purported subversives. The single sentence of von Brunn's movie pitch which outlines the plot describes an implausible conspiracy theory regarding Israel's attack on the U.S.S. Liberty during the 1967 war. His gist was that the Israelis intended to sink the ship and pin responsibility on "the Palestinians". Von Brunn's proposed title for the project was "Blood Bath in Zion".

According to the proposal, General Glubb was to serve as "Chief Advisor to the story and film". Von Brunn apparently believed that Glubb was a friend of Robnett and had the pipe dream of using this connection to help fund his film.

At the time he was marketing his film idea, von Brunn had actually moved his family into the home of George W. Robnett's widow, Florence, a woman he describes on his website as

"83-yrs old, but possessed of a brilliant mind. She had been Dean of Women at Northwestern University. She was a fervent right-wing Aryan."

While living in her house, von Brunn had made republishing George Robnett's book and producing a film based on it a cottage industry, so to speak. Although von Brunn did assist Florence Robnett in privately publishing an edition of the book (under the title "Zionist Rape of the Holy Land!"), the film version, not surprisingly, was not to be. Within a year, von Brunn moved his family out of Florence Robnett's house because, according to him, his step-daughter was having difficulty dealing with going to an integrated high school. They moved to a virtually all white area of northern California.

Acknowledgement: Thanks to the librarians at the University of Oregon library for their assistance in providing copies of these letters.

More information on General Pedro Del Valle is available here and here.

Monday, June 15, 2009

Dennis Ross, who most recently served as a special State Department envoy to Iran, will abruptly be relieved of his duties, sources in Washington told Haaretz. An official announcement is expected in the coming days.

The Obama administration will announce that Ross has been reassigned to another position in the White House. In his new post, the former Mideast peace envoy under President Bill Clinton will deal primarily with regional issues related to the peace process.

Washington insiders speculate that a number of reasons moved the administration to reassign Ross. One possibility is Iran's persistent refusal to accept Ross as a U.S. emissary given the diplomat's Jewish background as well as his purported pro-Israel leanings. Ross is known to maintain contacts with numerous senior officials in Israel's defense establishment and the Israeli government.

Diplomatic sources in Jerusalem surmised that another possibility for Ross' ouster is his just-released book, "Myths, Illusions, and Peace - Finding a New Direction for America in the Middle East."

Ross, who co-wrote the book with David Makovsky, a former journalist who is a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, argued against a linkage between the Palestinian issue and the West's policy against Iran's nuclear ambitions.

Ross and Mokovsky also raised the possibility of military action against Iran.

"Tougher policies - either militarily or meaningful containment - will be easier to sell internationally and domestically if we have diplomatically tried to resolve our differences with Iran in a serious and credible fashion," they wrote.

Another possible reason for the reshuffle could be Ross' dissatisfaction with his present standing in the State Department, particularly given the fact that Washington's two other envoys to the region - George Mitchell, who is overseeing the Mideast peace process; and Richard Holbrooke, who is dealing with Pakistan and Afghanistan - wield great influence and are featured prominently.

A diplomatic source in Jerusalem speculated that perhaps Ross preferred to work for the National Security Agency, which answers directly to President Barack Obama, and would thus be considered a more enhanced role.

Last year, Ross was an advisor to Obama's successful presidential campaign. Before Obama's inauguration, speculation was rampant as to which job Ross would assume in the new administration.

On February 24, 2009, he was officially appointed as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's advisor on the Persian Gulf and special envoy to Iran.

1. Ross, a veteran diplomat, was never envoy to Iran. He was a "special adviser" with responsibility for providing advice about the entire Middle East region (except for, um, a lot of other countries in the Middle East.) The U.S. government never wanted an envoy to Iran because an official appointment would signify that Iran merited the same official attention and respect as, say, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Obama's engagement policy is more cautious than that.

2. His position at the State Department has been tenuous and his status unclear; that's led to leaks and questions from his friends about what the heck he does.

3. He remains a valued adviser to the president, and he will probably end up serving in an advisory capacity at the National Security Council, where he won't have to fight political battles with Richard Holbrooke (who has hired Iranian experts for his staff) and others.

NIAC members have been sharing their stories with us all day. Here is another, this one alleging more fraud:

One close friend of mine worked as election official in Shiraz. He says they received 70 ballot boxes, in which 40 of them were with broken seals. The answer to the question of “why the seals are open?” was that the boxes move in the car during transit, so the seals came off. He says the votes in the 40 open boxes were all for Ahmadinejad and Moosavi was leading in the rest of the 30 boxes.

Friday, June 12, 2009

The domain name for the racist website maintained by Holocaust Museum terrorist James von Brunn (holywesternempire.org) is registered to Steve Reimink of West Olive, Michigan (read here and here and here), the domestic partner of one of the leaders of Ron Paul's 2008 presidential campaign in western Michigan. (Read here and here and here and here.) The first hit of a google search of the phone number registered to von Brunn's website is the Paul campaign listing. (Read here.) The phone number listed for the website is identical to that listed on the official list of Ron Paul county coordinators. (Read here.) According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, Reimink has no known ties to racist groups; however, his email address features numbers frequently used as code by neo-Nazis (read here).

Reimink's domestic partner, who goes by the names Patty Thompson and Patty Anyanwu, served as the official Ottawa County Coordinator for the Ron Paul for President campaign (read here), in addition to participating in several Meetups associated with the campaign. (for example here).

Below is an webpage from one of her Ron Paul Meetups featuring her photo and a statement crediting her "life time partner", presumably Reimink, with getting her involved with "this fight".

Patty is a member ofWelcome to Citizens Reforming American Politics

Member of this Meetup Group since

August 6, 2007

Title

Lakeshore Organizer Ottawa County

Introduction

Hello everyone I look forward to meeting people that have the same values and interest that we do. My life time partner got me interested in this fight about 5 years ago, he is very knowledgeable and has helped me alot.

This Meetup is maintained by a political action committee in Muskegon which was formerly known as the Lake Michigan Ron Paul Meetup Group. It still appears to be devoted mainly to campaigning for Ron Paul but also has connections to the John Birch Society and the Constitution Party. Thompson worked with the group to organize the Grand Haven Tea Party (read here). With respect to issues, the group follows the model of the Paul campaign, with an emphasis on advocacy of an extreme view of state sovereignty. (Read here.) The group's coarse acronym (C.R.A.P.) is duplicated in a domain name owned jointly by Thompson and Reimink. (Read here.)

Among the documents posted on the group's website is an excerpt from the Congressional Record of 1940 featuring several of Congressman Jacob Thorkelson's notorious isolationist speeches on the floor of the House of Representatives including his reading into the record an anti-Semitic screed authored by the Imperial Fascist Union of London, England. (Read here in pdf.) This pamphlet warns at length that "the Jewish masonic teaching of racial equality has conquered Aryan thought in this country". Thorkelson is considered by some historians to be the most overtly pro-fascist congressman in U.S. history.

In an interview I conducted this morning with Leslie Bowman, Michigan State Coordinator for the Ron Paul campaign, Ms. Bowman expressed surprise at Thompson's connection to the Holocaust Museum shooter, characterizing Thompson as "a very hard worker on behalf of the campaign" who was very conscious of maintaining the campaign's positive image. Bowman stated that she had not known Thompson to express racist views or advocate violence.

Thompson, using the name Patty Anyanwu, also participated in the 2008 senatorial campaign of Scott A. Boman, a Libertarian. (Read here and here and here.) Under the same name, Thompson is listed as the State Coordinator of the We the People Foundation.

UPDATE (June 14, 2009 7:00 PM):

Steve Reimink was a supporter of Ron Paul's 2008 presidential campaign. On Jan. 11, 2008, Reimink signed a petition calling for a recount of the New Hampshire Republican primary. (See signature #3093 here.) Patty Thompson, using the name Patty Anyanwu, signed the same petition on Jan. 10. (See signature #1625 here.) At the time, some Ron Paul supporters believed that Paul performed poorly in the New Hampshire primary because it had been fixed as the result of either the vote count manipultion or rigged touch-screen machines.

From the website of the Holocaust Museum shooter Holywesternempire.com: cicero1

A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable for he is known and carries his banners openly. But the traitor moves among those within the gates freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself...for the traitor appears no traitor: He speaks is accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their faces and their garments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the souls of all men. He rots the soul of a nation; he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city; he infects the body politics so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is to be less feared.

Thursday, June 11, 2009

As a young former Navy lieutenant with Midwestern roots, Mr. von Brunn married here, had a son who attended the Trinity School on the Upper West Side, and worked at two major advertising firms.

It remains unclear what impact, if any, his 15 years in one of the most racially and religiously diverse cities in the world had on the development of the white supremacist ideology that fueled the rambling conspiracy theories he peddled on Web sites and, apparently, Wednesday’s attack.

“Many of the people who joined this movement in fact grew up in integrated areas,” said Mark Potok, director of the Intelligence Project for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has been tracking Mr. von Brunn since his arrest and conviction in 1981 for barging into the Federal Reserve headquarters in Washington with a gun. “It’s not the norm, but it’s not unusual.”

A record of the Web site AskART, on which Mr. von Brunn appears to have posted a lengthy artist profile of himself, details his time in New York after he left the military as a period in which he began building a family while struggling to start a career. Those details, some of which have been confirmed, are interspersed with the anti-Jewish speech he trumpeted on his Web site.

Mr. von Brunn wrote that during this period he was “asked to change his German name by several companies during his 20-years New York career.” It was also in New York where he acquired a copy of “Iron Curtain Over America,” an anti-Semitic book by John Beaty that Mr. von Brunn said had a “tremendous” effect on his life.

Mr. von Brunn moved to New York City in 1947. He said he studied art at the Central Park School of Art, which is defunct, and the still-active Art Student’s League of New York, which would not comment Thursday. He said he tried to work in the newspaper business, “but all doors were closed to conservatives.”

Instead, he said, he took a job “in big-league advertising on Madison Avenue where he started as paste-up boy at $35 per week.” In that period, the world of advertising was heavily segregated, so it would have been extremely rare for Mr. von Brunn to work alongside anyone of either Jewish or African-American descent, said Jacqueline Reid Wachholz, director of the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History at Duke University.

Mr. von Brunn spent 18 months, starting in 1947, as an assistant art director at Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, a leading advertising agency whose clients included General Electric, said Jocelyn Weiss Malas, a spokeswoman for the company. It was an entry-level position, and his responsibilities included pasting advertising mock-ups to boards for display. (The company is still a leading ad agency today, under the name BBDO Worldwide, and it continues to work on ads for G.E.)

At the time, Benton & Bowles, which no longer exists, was one of the country’s foremost firms, with big name clients like Procter & Gamble, said Ms. Reid of Duke, which now holds the company’s archives. It would have been a period of transition, Ms. Reid said, with the company’s pioneering use of radio — including soap operas as a vehicle to sell products — giving way to new marketing aimed at television, such as the firm’s iconic pitch of “Look, ma — no cavities!” for Crest toothpaste.

On June 1, 1950, Mr. von Brunn married Patricia Beverley-Giddings in the Long Ridge Congregational Church in Connecticut, according to a wedding announcement. A year later they had a boy, also named James, whom they sent to the Trinity School on the Upper West Side. School records show a student named von Brunn attending the school from September 1957 until June 1960, a school spokesman said.